


all i want is always you

by flavus



Series: can i try again, try again, try again [2]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Declarations Of Love, Happy Ending, Love Confessions, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Reunions, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29896944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flavus/pseuds/flavus
Summary: Kurapika makes a request of Leorio. Thankfully, this one doesn't involve killing. It just involves climbing out of a window.
Relationships: Gon Freecs & Kurapika & Leorio Paladiknight & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck, Kurapika/Leorio Paladiknight
Series: can i try again, try again, try again [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2198181
Comments: 13
Kudos: 41





	all i want is always you

**Author's Note:**

> a loose continuation of [this leopika oneshot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29263242). you should probably read that one first, since there are a couple references to it in this! but this can possibly stand on its own, too.
> 
> not my finest work, i think, but trying to work through some writer's block from planning for my big bang fic + the rest is just whatever & this came up. set in some ambiguous future gratuitously post-canon 
> 
> title from "i will" by mitski to keep the ~mitski vibes~ consistent!!

Kurapika made himself comfortable on the wooden panels of the roof of Gon's childhood home, wrapping his arms loosely around his legs. The wind brushed his hair around his face, smelling faintly of salt. 

To one side, below him, he saw the faint bustle of activity in Whale Island proper, people meandering on familiar paths and paying for produce for their dinners. To another, he saw the ocean stretching out before him like a blanket, Gon and Killua's heads bobbed above the water, looking like green and white balls. The sun showered everything with orange dust; he had heard years ago, from Gon, about the sunsets on Whale Island being more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. 

He had disagreed, flashes of the sky on fire with brilliant orange in Lukso cutting into his brain. 

"You just have to come visit, Kurapika. Then you'll know I'm right!"

It was one of the only arguments he and Gon ever had. It was also one of the only arguments that Kurapika would admit to losing. But maybe Whale Island sunsets, from this vantage point, had an unfair advantage. Said advantage was sitting a small distance away from him, position a mirror of Kurapika's own. 

The years had been kinder to Leorio than they had to him. Leorio had filled into the clothes he wore so naturally that anything off-the-rack looked like it was made for him. Even the gray Yorknew Medical T-shirt he wore, logo faded with age and wear, made Leorio look like a mannequin at one of the department stores Neon loved. 

Kurapika's clothes had only started to even look like they belonged on him and not on a giant. He could feel the white hairs growing on his head every time he so much as breathed — whether as a result of Emperor Time or residual, perpetual stress, he would never know. But Leorio had grown into the face that, to a sixteen-year-old Kurapika and a twelve-year-old Gon and Killua, looked like it belonged to someone at thirty. Any lines on his friend's face probably came from laughter, smiling at patients with the megawatt smile Kurapika had never forgotten every time it was directed his way. 

Leorio's cheekbones caught the sunlight and Kurapika caught his breath. 

"You aren't a fan of talking on solid ground?"

A smile slid onto Kurapika's lips like it was the most natural thing, not something that he had only begun easing himself back into. 

"Not when it comes to you, no."

"So that was what I needed to do to get you to answer my calls. Meet you on a boat. Or on midair."

Kurapika stiffened at the reminder of his self-imposed absence.

"I deserve that," he said instead of running. 

"Yeah. You do."

There wasn't malice in Leorio's tone, though. Instead acceptance, which Kurapika supposed Leorio had grown used to as part of the admittedly meager package of friendship Kurapika offered, which included a stubborn pattern of withdrawing as a way to protect the people he cared about. 

Still, Kurapika heard a note of surprise from Leorio, possibly because he hadn't expected Kurapika to stay next to him instead of run away under the guise of something new to do. Kurapika let his eyes land on Leorio. He was still looking out toward the ocean, a breeze tousling his dark brown hair, arms drawn around his legs and a resolute set to his mouth.

Kurapika thought about asking if Leorio wanted to leave. 

Leorio had been the first to answer the doorbell when Kurapika arrived on Gon's front porch, the last of the four of them to make it. Some things, he knew, would never change. One of them was how easily he could read Leorio; the man still broadcasted everything he felt in his face and eyes. 

"Eyes are the window to one's soul," his mom had told him. He asked what his scarlet eyes meant. She just smiled, tapped his nose, and told him that he had a soul like fire. 

He saw the look on the other man's face when he had shown up on Gon's front porch, Leorio the first to answer the doorbell. 

They stood there for a moment before, tentatively — almost in slow motion — Leorio opened his arms to Kurapika. He walked in.

Leorio still broadcasted everything he felt in his eyes. That was another thing that hadn't changed after five years. 

Though he could've expected it, Kurapika wasn't prepared for the hurt that barrelled into him the moment their eyes met. The hurt that appeared in the way Leorio didn't pull him close, just wrapped his arms around him, touching fabric but not skin. 

But Leorio was here on the roof. He was here when Kurapika asked if they could meet at sunset, although there wasn't much avoiding it when they had been staying in the same house, a hallway away from each other at night.

"Here I was, thinking you liked roofs. Silly me," Kurapika said, tearing his eyes away from Leorio to look at Gon and Killua again. The green and white had mingled into _greenandwhite_ and Kurapika ached with want. 

"It's not so much that I like them, it's that I'm near them when you are." 

That voice. Kurapika turned to see Leorio fixing him with a look, resolute and unwavering. The confession knocked whatever breath Kurapika had out of his lungs. 

"I'm, uh. Glad you're alive," Leorio said, clearing his throat. 

"You too." Kurapika paused, tried to get together what he had come to say. "I tried to call you, you know. You're a hard man to find. Everything I heard from you was through Cheadle, Gon, and Killua."

"Hard to find when I don't want to be found," Leorio corrected, quiet, wry. "I'm glad to know I gave a Blacklist Hunter a hard time." As hard as he gave me, Kurapika knew Leorio could've said. 

"But you came." It was a question as much as it was a statement.

"How did you know I was going to?"

"I didn't," Kurapika said. "I just hoped." 

They lapsed again into silence, watching the ocean. 

* * *

Kurapika had planned a speech for the next time he and Leorio met. 

The speech and him had a history: It began on the airship back from Lukso, once he buried his clan and put the Spiders into their graves. 

Greenery had covered the ruin left by the Phantom Troupe, burying the huts he had grown up around and in. Kurapika didn't recognize his childhood home but for an impulse, some part of him that understood that his feet had walked across these paths before. 

The first time he arrived in the province, he sobbed for hours, clutching the eyes that he had worked so hard to collect. He had not been a child in a long time, but he let himself feel small. 

The funeral was a month long, not so much a funeral as an honoring of the Kurta at large. Kurapika had cobbled together an understanding of Kurta funeral ceremonies from the few he had been to as a child and the faded scroll permanently stationed in his front suit pocket. He wove together flower garlands to hang on the trees, conjured chains to tie the garlands together. For once, he resolved, he would get to use them for healing something else. He rebuilt what he remembered of the huts and prepared the dishes his mom had made by memory. Doing something with his hands that didn't involve death brought him back to an innocence he never thought he would remember. 

On the last day of the ceremony, Kurapika sat with the eyes of his dead clan, imagining they all surrounded him. He placed them in a grassy clearing bracketed by trees and sat in the middle. For once, he did not tell them of his anger against the Phantom Troupe. He felt as earnest as a little kid, telling them about the first friends he had made since Pairo's death: Gon, Killua, Melody, Leorio, Basho, Mizai. 

He spent an inordinate amount of time telling them about Leorio. He told them about the first time the two of them met, scowling as he remembered the anger that had gripped him when Leorio carelessly insulted him. 

"I defended your honor, of course," he said to the eyes, which said nothing back. "I'm glad it didn't come to blows, though." 

He couldn't remove the smile that fixed itself onto his face when he recounted the events of the Hunter Exam to them, the constant verbal banter between him and Leorio that came to a head on Zevil island, where play-fighting led to real vulnerability. The nights they spent alone and alert became space for both of them to confide worries that felt safer to let out under the stars than in broad daylight. 

He told them about their trip on the Black Whale, where he'd been constantly starstruck by Leorio's charisma and bedside manner. He laughed, confiding in them that sometimes he wanted to get increasingly reckless so as to be treated by Leorio. He could feel an accusatory glare on him, to which he shrugged and said that if your doctor and friend was ruggishly attractive, of course you'd do the same. And he was alive, still, so it didn't matter.

In the silence, he swore he heard more than a few agonized sighs at that last bit. 

"Yeah," he laughed. "Leorio felt that way, too." 

He went quiet, confessing how bad of a friend he had been to Leorio. That maybe he had been mistaken; that it wasn't his choice to make, whether his friends could be involved in his journey for revenge. That he had let Leorio's calls go unanswered, except for the one time he didn't. How he had shown up on the balcony and asked a question to which he already knew the answer — both Leorio's and his. 

"Did I realize that too late? Have I already driven him away? I don't know if I ever told him I was sorry." 

Tell him, then, he heard voices chorus in his head. As if his entire clan was sending him a message, telling him to go get his man — he's not my man, Kurapika corrected, but knew how he felt. He knew what he wanted and was blown away by the ferocity of that want, because he forgot that it existed outside of the context of revenge.

So once he left, he started writing. The speech, handwritten, had been in his pocket for months, steadily growing until it formed a permanent bulge over his chest that raised more than a few eyes. A glare he kept at the ready for the occasion, however, kept questions away. Most of it was scribbling out phrases that didn't sound right. The other part of it was figuring out how to explain away his stubbornness, how to tell Leorio "I'm sorry that I didn't consider your feelings and made assumptions and thought that I knew what was best for you, and also I am in love with you, but first I want to be your friend and I know that this isn't going to be easy" in a hundred different iterations that all seemed worse than the last. 

He knew that Leorio wouldn't care about the language, if he ever came close enough to listen — he knew the other man was avoiding him, and he decided not to push. He tried calling Leorio once, but his number had changed. That was a message that Kurapika wanted to respect. It was the least he could do. 

But Kurapika was also selfish. So he asked Gon for help.

* * *

The sun had almost set. Gon and Killua were no longer in the water; they were walking along the beach, hand-in-hand.

"You were the one who called the reunion," Leorio said, realizing. "You wanted us to be back together."

"And what if I was?" 

Kurapika's heart was thudding so loudly that he was glad Melody couldn't hear it; it would've overwhelmed her senses even more than it was overwhelming his. The speech in his front pocket suddenly felt like a weight pinning him to the roof. He found it and pulled it out, hands shaking. 

"Kurapika. I can't —"

"Fuck this," and Kurapika tore up the speech, all the rolled-up pages and smeared fingerprints and hesitance forgotten. 

"Do you still mean what you said on the balcony? I want that, and I am so, so sorry, Leorio. I don't know if I ever told you that, but I will tell you every single day, even if it won't make up for all the times that I could've answered instead of throwing you my apologies. I want," and he swallowed, wanting to stop, but he had already made it this far and he was nothing if not stubborn, "I want you, Leorio. I want to be in your life again, however you'll have me."

He couldn't look at Leorio. He forced his eyes down to his feet and the quiet lasted so long that Kurapika was surprised they weren't surrounded by stars by the time he figured that Leorio had nothing to say to him. 

He got up to leave. 

Then, a tug on his hand. A sudden warmth. Kurapika looked down through moist, red eyes to see the hand was connected to Leorio's.

"Don't go," Leorio said fiercely. He made no effort to hide the glassiness in his eyes. "Not anymore."

"What if I need to go to the bathroom?" The words came out garbled from Kurapika's clogged throat. "I don't right now, but what about in the future?"

Leorio just laughed. 

"Then go. Please don't pee on me. As long as you come back."

"How do you know that I will?" Kurapika hated himself for asking the question, but Leorio seemed to have expected it. 

"You're easier to read than you think. Not just because of your scarlet eyes, but." He paused. "Your body language. I've gotten used to looking for tells." 

He flushed, realizing what he had said. "I mean, not that I'm just checking you out all the time, I promise it's a doctor thing, it's also a friend thing, and I just —"

Kurapika stopped him with a kiss to the lips that overrode both their higher brain functioning.

It was messy, seven years of want colliding into one moment — their teeth bumped against each other, Kurapika's mouth brushing upper lip more than anything else, but Leorio's hands found their way into Kurapika's hair and it was enough for him to angle his mouth properly against Leorio's. He thumbed away the tears that had collected in Leorio's eyes and the other repeated the motion, because of course, he did, and tenderness swirled in Kurapika's chest. 

Leorio's lips were warm and soft and tasted like the ocean breeze they'd been breathing for the past few days. Kurapika slid his tongue across Leorio's lower lip, a question that Leorio answered by repetition. Kurapika wanted Leorio all over him, pulled himself onto Leorio's lap and the other man wrapped his arms around Kurapika's waist, brought him closer until there wasn't any ounce of space between them.

"Seven years, and the first time you kiss me is to shut me up," Leorio said when Kurapika pulled away, breathing heavy, eyes scarlet. His forehead was still pressed against Leorio's. 

"So friends again?"

He didn't have to look at Leorio to see the fond eyeroll. 

"Friends, sure. If that's what makes you happy." 

"But what will make you happy, Leorio?"

"When the sun sets, a jacket."

"Leorio."

"A good dinner, probably. Gon says Whale Island has the best lobster rolls, which surprises me because I don't think lobsters are found in this region."

"They aren't."

"Let me finish, Kurapika," Leorio sighed, faux-exasperated. He bopped Kurapika on the nose with a finger, to which Kurapika stuck his tongue out. He felt years younger, butterflies banging around in his chest like they had when he saw Leorio walk into his room with nothing but a towel covering his waist. "Anyway. A good dinner. Mito's let the kids make it tonight, so I'm worried, but Killua could be a secret chef genius. He's good at pretty much everything, like you, which is extremely unfair. Whatever they make, though, won't be as good as what we make tomorrow." 

"Tomorrow," Kurapika repeated. "We're making dinner tomorrow?"

"You asked what would make me happy."

"I can't cook, Leorio." 

"That's a shame. I was hoping that we could make something better than Gon and Killua." 

Oh. Oh. Kurapika's heart caught in his throat and he leaned his head against Leorio's shoulder. 

"You know it's not a contest." He tangled his hand in Leorio's anyway. "It's completely different, anyway. If it was about timing, they had us beat by years."

Leorio pressed a kiss to Kurapika's temple. 

"Dinner, not dancing. Not yet. Things aren't going to be fixed in one conversation." 

"I know." Kurapika leaned against Leorio's lips. "But this time, I promise I'll stay for however many conversations there are. In sickness and in health."

"You heard." The warmth in his voice split Kurapika open. 

"I always listen. If it's you," and he angled his head so he could kiss Leorio again underneath the stars. 

In the distance, Gon pointed out that the two shadows on the roof had become one and gave Killua a high-five. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! i treasure any comments + kudos <3 
> 
> find me on twitter @janelle_cpp or tumblr @katipunan


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